In the final big ensemble number of "My One and Only" at Cohoes Music Hall, when about 15 dancers in sparkly costumes are pounding the stage in unison with their tap shoes, you can't help but smile, appreciating both the cast's skill and the evident joy they're taking in dancing to Gershwin.

Essentially an early jukebox musical, "My One and Only" was created 30 years ago as a way to showcase more than a dozen great songs written decades before by George and Ira Gershwin. A story was fashioned to highlight the glamor and sense of possibility of the late 1920s, when air travel and international communication were bringing the world closer together. Though the conceit is fairly flimsy — a Texan pilot intent on being the first to fly solo from New York to Paris instead falls in love with a beauty famous for swimming the English Channel — but it's sufficient framework on which to hang the songs and to occasion much dancing.

Similar pleasures from players in smaller parts fill the show. Busy area actor Kris Anderson, often a scene stealer in whatever he's in, delivers a goofily over-the-top turn as a bogus prince who's intent on keep the central couple apart. Ellisha Marie has ace comic timing as a tough-talking airplane mechanic with a secret. And Gregory Omar Robinson drips with style and insinuation as Mr. Magix, who becomes the pilot's adviser in matters sartorial and amorous.

As the swimmer Edythe Herbert, Erin West has a bright, controlled voice, she moves well, and she looks beautiful in Halliday's costumes. She also brings dimension to a thin role, showing us a woman torn between her past and her feelings for the pilot. Her accent, however, varies from British to European to East Coast American, and it's representative of the many small problems evident throughout opening night that, one hopes, will be fixed. The spotlights often couldn't follow the action, lighting cues changed, or didn't, bafflingly, one of the projection screens had a mouse pointer in the middle of it, and an electronic hum from the sound system, which company director Jim Charles pointed out in a pre-show speech, was never fixed.

Those can be remedied, but there's really nothing to be done about the singing voice of Nicky Romaniello as the pilot, Capt. Billy Buck Chandler. Romaniello can dance, but the role requires a singer-dancer, and he's only half of that hyphenate. Lacking a solid sense of pitch, intonation and rhythm, Romaniello just about ruins the songs he performs. Most of the male ensemble members seem like they'd have been better choices for the role.

It's an unfortunate hole at the center of an otherwise decent production.